In a few days they began to ask
themselves why the garrison, since it lacked food, had not yet
surrendered. "It was necessary through the press bureau to request
them to drop the encirclement theme." [Footnote: Pierrefeu, _op.
cit._, pp. 134-5.]
2
The editor of the French communiqu? tells us that as the battle
dragged out, his colleagues and he set out to neutralize the
pertinacity of the Germans by continual insistence on their terrible
losses. It is necessary to remember that at this time, and in fact
until late in 1917, the orthodox view of the war for all the Allied
peoples was that it would be decided by "attrition." Nobody believed
in a war of movement. It was insisted that strategy did not count, or
diplomacy. It was simply a matter of killing Germans. The general
public more or less believed the dogma, but it had constantly to be
reminded of it in face of spectacular German successes.
"Almost no day passed but the communiqu?.... ascribed to the Germans
with some appearance of justice heavy losses, extremely heavy, spoke
of bloody sacrifices, heaps of corpses, hecatombs. Likewise the
wireless constantly used the statistics of the intelligence bureau at
Verdun, whose chief, Major Cointet, had invented a method of
calculating German losses which obviously produced marvelous results.
Every fortnight the figures increased a hundred thousand or so. These
300,000, 400,000, 500,000 casualties put out, divided into daily,
weekly, monthly losses, repeated in all sorts of ways, produced a
striking effect.
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